Electronic Book Review - hamlethttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/hamlet
enGenre Troublehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigilant
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<div class="field-item even">Espen Aarseth</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-21</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Introduction: Stories and Games</h2>
<p>Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be “texts,” and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games’ generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from <span class="foreignWord">media non grata</span> to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.</p>
<p>The great stake-claiming race is on, and academics from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping “the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure” (to quote from the ad in <span class="filmtitle">Blade Runner</span>). As with any land rush, the respect for local culture and history is minimal, while the belief in one’s own tradition, tools, and competence is unfailing. Computer game studies is virgin soil, ready to be plotted and plowed by the machineries of cultural and textual studies. What better way to map the territory than by using the trusty, dominant paradigm of stories and storytelling? The story perspective has many benefits: it is safe, trendy, and flexible. In a (Western) world troubled by addiction, attention deficiency, and random violence, stories are morally and aesthetically acceptable. In stories, meaning can be controlled (despite what those deconstructionists may have claimed). Storytelling is a valuable skill, the main mode of successful communication. And theories of storytelling are (seemingly) universal: they can be applied to and explain any medium, phenomenon, or culture. So why should not games also be a type of story?</p>
<p>In the context of computer games (and in most other contexts as well) stories and storytelling appear to be extremely old phenomena, spanning all of media history, and numerous media technologies. Show me a medium not suited to storytelling: it is probably a completely useless one. Computer games, with scarcely forty years of history, represent a mere last few seconds in the long evolutionary history of storytelling. Clearly, when we compare stories to computer games, stories hold a much stronger position, which games cannot dream of reaching in the near future. Well, that is the optimistic version. Some see it in pessimistic terms; in the words of a prominent Scandinavian literary theorist, computer games are a sign of cultural decay. Perhaps they need a new name - how about “interactive narratives”?</p>
<p>There are many types of comparativism. It can be dangerous, especially when one object is cherished and well-known, and the other is marginal and suspect. And in the context of this general story/game discussion, we have the danger of generic criticism. You know the kind that goes: “Traditional music is much better than jazz,” or “Novels are a higher art form than movies.” If we judge individual works on the basis of their genre, we may have lost already.</p>
<p>But what about stories and games? To address computer games as a consistent genre or medium is highly problematic. From <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span> on a mobile phone to <span class="booktitle">Super Mario</span> on a Gameboy to <span class="booktitle">Everquest</span> on a Midi-tower Windows machine there is a rather large span of different genres, social contexts, and media technologies. It cannot be repeated often enough that the computer is not a medium, but a flexible material technology that will accomodate many very different media. Hence, there is no “computer medium” with one set of fixed capabilities, nor is there “the medium of the computer game.” Games are, at best, a somewhat definable cultural genre.</p>
<p>No doubt the same can be said for stories. However, if we compare them as cultural traditions, their positions become more equal. How can that be? Well, computer games are games, and games are not new, but very old, probably older than stories. It could even be argued that games are older than human culture, since even animals play games. You don’t see cats or dogs tell each other stories, but they will play. And games are interspecies communication: you can’t tell your dog a story, but the two of you can play together.</p>
<p>So, rather than being a newcomer, computer games are games in a new material technology, just as print novels were literature in a new technology 500 years ago. Yet, it seems, “we” only discovered games as cultural artifacts a few years ago. Before that, games were not an object for aesthetic study, but relegated to the study of children and primitive cultures, with a very few notable exceptions, such as Brian Sutton-Smith (Sutton-Smith 1997). However, games are not camera-ready pieces of art either. Because games are not one form, but many, they cannot be one art form. And why would aesthetics be the most relevant perspective? Some games may have artistic ambitions, others do not. Games are games, a rich and extremely diverse family of practices, and share qualities with performance arts (play, dance, music, sports) material arts, (sculpture, painting, architecture, gardening) and the verbal arts (drama, narrative, the epos). But fundamentally, they are games. The artistic elements are merely supports for what the Finnish avant garde writer and game theorist Markku Eskelinen calls “the gaming situation,” the gameplay (Eskelinen 2001).</p>
<p>Are games texts? The best reason I can think of why one would ask such a crude question is because one is a literary or semiotic theorist and wants to believe in the relevance of one’s training.</p>
<p>Games are not “textual” or at least not primarily textual: where is the text in chess? We might say that the <span class="lightEmphasis">rules</span> of chess constitute its “text,” but there is no recitation of the rules during gameplay, so that would reduce the textuality of chess to a subtextuality or a paratextuality. A central “text” does not exist – merely context. Any game consists of three aspects: (1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld). Of these three, the semiotic system is the most coincidental to the game. As the Danish theorist and game designer Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001b), games are eminently themeable: you can play chess with some rocks in the mud, or with pieces that look like the Simpson family rather than kings and queens. It would still be the same game. The “royal” theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently (see <a href="/thread/firstperson/aside" class="internal">sidebar</a>). When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it. In addition to these three components, there is the player’s active knowledge of the game, in the form of strategies and performance techniques, and mental topographies, as well as written guides and other paratextual information about the games.</p>
<p>It follows that games are not intertextual either; games are self-contained. You don’t need to have played poker or ludo to understand chess, and knowledge of roulette will not help you to understand Russian roulette. (Neither will cultural knowledge of Russia. On the other hand, <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span> is also a dangerous Russian game…) Knowing <span class="booktitle">Star Wars: The Phantom Menace</span> will not make you better at playing <span class="booktitle">Pod Racer</span> (Juul 2001a). Unlike in music, where a national anthem played on electric guitar takes on a whole new meaning, the value system of a game is strictly internal, determined unambivalently by the rules. Among the many differences between games and stories, one of the most obvious is that of ambiguity. In <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span>, I do not stop to ponder what those bricks are really supposed to be made of. In <span class="booktitle">Doom</span>, there is no moral dilemma resulting from the killing of probably innocent monsters. The pleasure of games is quite different from the pleasures of the novel: for a chess or <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span> player, replaying is the norm, while most novels are read only once. You can be an expert chess player without playing any other game, but to understand even a single novel you will need to have studied numerous others.</p>
<p>Certainly many – indeed most – games, use texts much the same way food products do (“boil the spaghetti for seven minutes”), but it seems unreasonable therefore to claim that food is textual. And in driving your car, you are constantly reading the traffic signs and the meters on your dashboard, but we still don’t consider driving cars as a subgenre of reading.</p>
<p>However, the (academic) discovery of computer games over the last two decades is accompanied by the most smothering form of generic criticism: the attempt to reform games into a more acceptable form of art, literature or film; i.e., as narratives. Shakespeare’s <span class="booktitle">Hamlet</span> was pretty good, but soon we can have something even better: <span class="booktitle">Hamlet the Game</span>. This idea, termed the “Holodeck myth” by Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) with reference to Janet Murray’s book <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span> (1997), was first proposed by Brenda Laurel (1986; 1991) as a form of computer-controlled real-time participant drama, and attempted by research projects such as Joseph Bates’ Oz project at Carnegie Mellon University. As a theory, this narrativistic colonialism might seem aesthetically problematic (Aarseth 1997, chapter six), as well as technologically unachievable (Bringsjord 2001), but there are many versions of it, and some are more sophisticated than others.</p>
<h2>The Story-Game Ideology</h2>
<p>Underlying the drive to reform games as “interactive narratives,” as they are sometimes called, lies a complex web of motives, from economic (“games need narratives to become better products”), elitist and eschatological (“games are a base, low-cultural form; let’s try to escape the humble origins and achieve `literary’ qualities”), to academic colonialism (“computer games are narratives, we only need to redefine narratives in such a way that these new narrative forms are included”). At a recent game conference, it was stated that the difference between films and games was simply the “interactivity” of the games.</p>
<p>This latter motive, the only one of the three mentioned before to concern us here, seems to me to spring out of a certain ideology, much practiced by humanists, and also well beyond our ivory towers; an ideology that we might call “narrativism.” This is the notion that everything is a story, and that story-telling is our primary, perhaps only, mode of understanding, our cognitive perspective on the world. Life is a story, this discussion is a story, and the building that I work in is also a story, or better, an architectural narrative. Ironically, most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.</p>
<p>Yet among anthropologists, business people, technologists, visual artists, media theorists, and other laypersons, this ideology – or what Alan Rauch once fittingly called <span class="lightEmphasis">story fetishism</span> – is strong and uncontested. And to us humanists, the (let’s face it) lowest caste of the academic world, it is nice to feel important again, for once. Finally, our expertise matters! We don’t know much about technology, or biology, but we do know stories and storytelling. So why be critical when we can be important instead?</p>
<p>So, then, is storytelling the solution to all the world’s problems, from business strategies to computer game design? If rhetoric is indeed our game, then we should be able to see through this one. But it is a very nice dream.</p>
<p>And this is of course not an attack on the importance of stories. Storytelling has been, and still is, the dominant form of cultural expression. But it is not the only game in town, the only mode of discourse. It is quite possible, not to mention necessary, to identify other modes, games among them, as alternatives to storytelling. But what exactly is the relationship between games and stories? Is it a dichotomy? A rivalry? Or perhaps a continuum? As Eskelinen has pointed out, both stories and games are medium-independent. A story can be translated from novel to comic book, to movie, to TV series, to opera, etc. A game can be translated from board and dice, to a live role-play out in the woods, to numbers and letters on a screen, to a three-dimensional virtual world. From <span class="booktitle">SpaceWar</span> (1961) to <span class="booktitle">Star Raiders</span> (1979), <span class="booktitle">Elite</span> (1984), to <span class="booktitle">X - Beyond the Frontier</span> (1999), not much has happened in the rules and gameplay: the games have increasingly better 3D graphics, but the theme and objectives remain the same. <span class="booktitle">Rogue</span> (1980) and <span class="booktitle">Diablo</span> (1997) are basically the same game (see <a href="/thread/firstperson/aside" class="internal">sidebar</a>).</p>
<p>What is lost in translation? In the various versions of a story, key events and relationships remain; in the versions of a game, the rules remain. <cite id="note_1">The following discussion builds on Juul (2001a).</cite> But when we try to translate a game into a story, what happens to the rules? What happens to the gameplay? And a story into a game: what happens to the plot? And, to use Marie-Laure Ryan’s example (2001), what player, in the game version of <span class="booktitle">Anna Karenina</span>, playing the main character, Holodeck style, would actually commit suicide, even virtually? Novels are very good at relating the inner lives of characters (films perhaps less so); games are awful at that, or, wisely, they don’t even try. We might say that, unlike literature, games are not about the Other, they are about the Self. Games focus on self-mastery and exploration of the external world, not exploration of interpersonal relationships (except for multiplayer games). Or when they try to, like the recent bestselling games <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> or <span class="booktitle">Black and White</span>, it is from a godlike, Asmodean perspective.</p>
<p>The aim of <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is to control and shape the interactions and daily life of your characters, not take human form yourself. Nevertheless, games like <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> are sometimes (not often) used as storytelling machines, when particularly memorable moments in the game are retold by the player/god. But this is not translation from game to story, this is simply good old after-the-fact narration, like the football column in the Monday sports section, the lab experiment report, or the slide show of one’s Carribean vacation. Something interesting happened, and we want to tell others about it. Ontologically, the capacity for generating memorable moments is something games have in common with real life, as well as with stories. A story-generating system does not have to be a story itself. In fact, while life and games are primary, real-time phenomena, consisting of real or virtual events, stories are secondary phenomena, a revision of the primary event, or a revision of a revision, etc.</p>
<p>And yet, we do have games inspired by films and novels, and vice versa: <span class="booktitle">The Hobbit</span>, <span class="booktitle">The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</span>, <span class="booktitle">Super Mario Brothers</span>, <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span>, <span class="booktitle">Goldeneye</span>, <span class="booktitle">Blade Runner</span>; the list is nearly endless. Are they not translations?</p>
<p>Genre theory can help us describe what goes on here: John Cawelti’s (1976) distinction between “underlying form” and “specific cultural conventions” would tell us that the underlying form (narrative structure or game rules) remains untranslatable, but the cultural conventions, such as the setting and character types of, say, <span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span>, are translated. While, as Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001a), the story of <span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span> is unextractable from the game of the same name, the setting, atmosphere and characters can be deduced. So, although nonnarrative and nonludic elements can be translated, the key elements, the narration and the gameplay, like oil and water, are not easily mixed.</p>
<h2>Story-Game Hybrids: The Adventure Game Genre</h2>
<p>And yet, there is a game genre that may also be called narrative. This is the so-called adventure game, a computer game genre that was born in 1976, when Donald Woods turned William Crowther’s text-based cave simulation into a fantasy game. This game, <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>, which consists of moving through a labyrinthine cave by solving puzzles (“how to get past the snake,” etc.), has a storylike, episodic structure, where the player/hero progresses in a linear fashion through the maze. For a while very popular, this textual genre died out commercially in the late 1980s when graphical computer games took over the market.</p>
<p>Structurally, however, it lives on in graphical computer games such as <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> (1993) and <span class="booktitle">Half-Life</span> (1997), where the same deterministic linearity and rule system dominate the play. By looking at sales figures, it could be claimed that these games successfully demonstrate the potential for combining stories and games. However, sales figures are not a reliable measure of artistic success, or – dare we say – quality. And according to one of the successful designer brothers of <span class="booktitle">Myst</span>, Robyn Miller, artistically <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> was a frustrating project. Miller, arguably one of the most successful game designers ever, later stopped making games and turned to animated movies, because he felt the game format in conflict with storytelling and character development. And there was this annoying intervening person, the player, to put up with. Most critics agree that the Miller brothers succeeded eminently in making a fascinating visual landscape, a haunting and beautiful gameworld, but to experienced gamers, the gameplay was boring and derivative, with the same linear structure that was introduced by the first <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span> game sixteen years earlier. Nice video graphics, shame about the game.</p>
<p>The greatest aesthetic problem for the adventure story-game seems to be believable characters. In the first adventure game there were just animals and monsters, and hardly any dialogue, and in <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> there were no characters at all, except for in a few static video sequences. In more dramatic adventure games, the characters’ behavior is totally prescripted, with a few lines repeated endlessly and brainlessly. The dramatic ambitions of these games remain unfulfilled and seem as unreachable as ever. What keeps the genre alive is increasingly more photorealistic, detailed three-dimensional graphical environments, but apart from that, it is mostly the same story-game over and over again. Unlike other games, but like most novels, these games are normally only played once, and typically not completed. This makes them very different from other games. Players are often stuck on one of the puzzles, and have no choice but either to buy the solutions book, download a “walkthrough” guide from the Internet, or give up. Perhaps we could say that this genre is really only one and the same game, the same rule system repeated over and over with variable cultural conventions and increasingly better technology.</p>
<p>As Robyn Miller suggested, the aesthetic problem in these games is a conflict between the opposing goals of gameplay and storytelling. Adventure games seldom, if at all, contain good stories. Even the most entertaining of these games, like Warren Spector’s <span class="booktitle">Deus Ex</span> (1999), contains a cliched storyline that would make a B-movie writer blush, and characters so wooden that they make <span class="booktitle">The Flintstones</span> look like Strindberg. The gameplay is constrained by the story in unrealistic ways (in <span class="booktitle">Deus Ex</span>, if you try to kill the secretary, it is simply not possible, because it does not fit the storyline). What makes such games playable at all, and indeed attractive, is the sequence of shifting, exotic, often fascinating settings (levels), where you explore the topography and master the virtual environment. The gameworld is its own reward, and the end, if and when it comes, does not offer dramatic satisfaction, but a feeling of limbo. There is no turning back, and no going forward. You are no longer employed by the game. Time to buy another.</p>
<h2>The Art of Simulation</h2>
<p>Other game genres may also employ storylines. In god-games such as <span class="booktitle">Civilization</span>, history itself plays the role of storyline. In strategy games such as <span class="booktitle">Heroes of Might and Magic</span>, <span class="booktitle">Command and Conquer</span>, <span class="booktitle">Warcraft</span>, or role-playing games such as <span class="booktitle">Ultima Underworld</span> or <span class="booktitle">Diablo</span>, the story is often an episodic progression between levels, with each level constituting a self-enclosed episode, like the individual matches in a football cup. True to their war-oriented themes, these series of levels are often called campaigns. A successful game such as <span class="booktitle">Heroes of Might and Magic</span> will offer both multilevel campaigns and stand-alone levels or “maps” (gameworlds), sometimes generated randomly by the game software. A randomly generated map can be just as satisfying to play as a human-authored gameworld or campaign, and this tells us that the real aesthetic quality of these games is in the design of the rule system, rather than in the design of the gameworld.</p>
<p>The pleasures of video games, as James Newman (2001) has pointed out, comparing <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span> to the cartoonish-looking <span class="booktitle">Super Mario Kart</span>, are not primarily visual, but kinaesthetic, functional and cognitive. Your skills are rewarded, your mistakes punished, quite literally. The game gaze is not the same as the cinema gaze, although I fear it will be a long time before film critics studying computer games will understand the difference. (Alongside narrativism, there is the equally problematic visualism.) But pleasure follows function, we might say. When it is there at all, the story in these games is superficial, like a bored taxi driver whose only function is to take us on to the next ludic event. In the case of <span class="booktitle">Heroes of Might and Magic</span>, story fragments pop up at specific times in a level. They are completely superfluous, like illustrations in a storybook, and ignoring them will not affect the gameplay at all.</p>
<p>The hidden structure behind these, and most, computer games is not narrative – or that silly and abused term, “interactivity” – but <span class="lightEmphasis">simulation</span>. Simulation is the key concept, a bottom-up hermeneutic strategy that forms the basis of so many cognitive activities: all sorts of training, from learning to pilot a plane to learning to command troops, but also the use of spreadsheets, urban planning, architectural design and CAD, scientific experiments, reconstructive surgery, and generative linguistics. And in entertainment: computer games. If you want to understand a phenomenon, it is not enough to be a good storyteller, you need to understand how the parts work together, and the best way to do that is to build a simulation. Through the hermeneutic circle of simulation/construction, testing, modification, more testing, and so forth, the model is moved closer to the simulated phenomenon.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">The computer game is the art of simulation</span>. A subgenre of simulation, in other words. Strategy games are sometimes misleadingly called “simulation” games, but all computer games contain simulation. Indeed, it is the dynamic aspect of the game that creates a consistent gameworld. Simulation is the hermeneutic Other of narratives; the alternative mode of discourse, bottom up and emergent where stories are top-down and preplanned. In simulations, knowledge and experience is created by the player’s actions and strategies, rather than recreated by a writer or moviemaker.</p>
<p>Culturally, especially in “high culture,” stories dominate still, but are currently losing ground to the new simulation-based discourse-types, e.g., in the entertainment market, where movies are being outsold by computer games. Stories and simulations are not totally incompatible, but the simulation, as a primary phenomenon, must form the basis of any combination of the two, and not vice versa, just as with stories and life. When you have built a simulation, such as a rule-based gameworld, you may use it to tell stories in (or for other purposes); but stories, on the other hand, can only contain simulations in a metaphorical sense, such as the movie <span class="booktitle">Groundhog Day</span>, or Tad Williams’ <span class="booktitle">Otherland</span> novels.</p>
<p>In the adventure games where there is a conflict between narrative and ludic aesthetics, it is typically the simulation that, on its own, allows actions that the story prohibits, or which make the story break down. Players exploit this to invent strategies that make a mockery of the author’s intentions. Dead or not, the authors of these games are little more than ghosts in the machine, and hardly <span class="lightEmphasis">auteurs</span>. When you put a story on top of a simulation, the simulation (or the player) will always have the last word.</p>
<p>It is time to recognize simulation and the need to simulate as a major new hermeneutic discourse mode, coinciding with the rise of computer technology, and with roots in games and playing.</p>
<h2>But What about Literature?</h2>
<p>But what about that other type of hybrid: not games with narrative ambitions, but narratives with game elements? Why don’t we look at texts that play games?, you may well ask. There is a long tradition of playful texts, from <span class="booktitle">Tristram Shandy</span> via detective stories and the OuLiPo, to experimental texts that happen to be digital; and some of these are of course very worthy of critical attention. John McDaid’s <span class="booktitle">Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse</span> (1991) springs to mind. But here I wanted to address the structure of gaming in its nonmetaphorical form. When we try to guess the murderer in a Poirot novel, we are adding a coincidental game to the story. The guessing game is not necessary, and the narrator doesn’t care whether we play or not. If we happen to guess correctly early on, nothing different happens in the novel. Worse, we may even stop reading prematurely, since the ending has become obvious and boring. These novels are games only in a metaphorical sense; they tease us, but we are not real players. In the case of hypertext fictions, we are explorers, but without recognizable rules, there is no real game. To equalize these metaphorical games with a real game is to marginalize an already (academically) marginal phenomenon, to privilege the <span class="lightEmphasis">illusion</span> of play over real play. And for game scholars, that is a poor strategy.</p>
<p>Literary experiments are either interesting or they are not. What medium they take place in should have little or nothing to do with it. In a world where practically all the arts use digital technology, it is only natural that literature also should do so, but hardly revolutionary. Generic criticism is a problem, whether it favors or marginalizes digital literature. Either way it is a kind of discrimination.</p>
<p>Katherine Hayles, the influential U.S. theorist of science and literature, recently rose to defend electronic literature as the endangered hybrid species produced by computer games and literature:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">While it is understandable that scholars fighting for critical turf want to claim all of the territory for themselves, the nature of the beast called electronic literature cannot be adequately understood if it is orphaned on either side of the family tree. From computer games come interactivity, major tropes such as searching for keys to a central mystery, and multiple narrative pathways chosen by interactors; from literary traditions come devices developed over millennia of experimentation and criticism such as point of view, narrative voice and literary allusions. To omit either of these resources would be to reduce electronic literature to something beyond our recognition. (Hayles 2001)</p>
<p>While I share Hayles’ concern that electronic literature should not be killed off in the border wars between game scholars and narrativists, I think her paternity case is rather weak. The real father of electronic literature is not computer games, but the computer interface itself. And the result, in the form of hypernovels such as Michael Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span> (1991), or generative poetry such as John Cayley’s <span class="booktitle">The Speaking Clock</span> (1995), is no hybrid, it is literature. The real game-literature hybrid, the textual adventure game, still lives on in the prolific amateur groups such as rec.arts.int-fiction on the Internet, but seems to have little influence on either game culture or literary culture in general.</p>
<p>Digital literature is still literature, pure, if not simple. When I can read a <span class="booktitle">Harry Potter</span> novel on my Palm Pilot, paper is no longer an integral part of literature’s material or ideological foundations. Digital literature, whether experimental like Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia” (2000) or strictly mainstream like Stephen King’s “Riding the Bullet” (2000), is still literature, not a hybrid. Like our ATM cards, which are just as real (and just as symbolic) as paper money, digital literature is real literature.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: From Multiplayers to Players</h2>
<p>The aesthetics and hermeneutics of games and simulations and their relations to stories (and also to knowledge production) pose a rich problem, of which I have only scratched the surface here. This is the kind of problem that makes aesthetic research meaningful and gratifying. Games and stories have distinct teleologies and artistic potentials, and it is analytically useful (for those of us genuinely interested in games as games, at least) to maintain a conceptual terminology that distinguishes between them. As I have argued here, the traditional hermeneutic paradigms of text, narrative and semiotics are not well-suited to the problems of a simulational hermeneutic. Games (as games) might be the best empirical entry point to this new mode of discourse, at least if we continue the humanist tradition of privileging artistic genres in our hermeneutic research.</p>
<p>My warnings about narrativism and theoretical colonialism might seem unduly harsh and even militant. Why not let the matter resolve itself, through scholarly, logical dialogue? The reason for this vigilance, however, is based on numbers. The sheer number of students trained in film and literary studies will ensure that the slanted and crude misapplication of “narrative” theory to games will continue and probably overwhelm game scholarship for a long time to come. As long as vast numbers of journals and supervisors from traditional narrative studies continue to sanction dissertations and papers that take the narrativity of games for granted and confuse the story-game hybrids with games in general, good, critical scholarship on games will be outnumbered by incompetence, and this is a problem for all involved. Hopefully this is just a short-lived phase, but it certainly is a phase that we are in right now. As more scholars from other disciplines, such as sociology, linguistics, history, economics, and geography, start to do research on games, perhaps the narrativist camp (and the <span class="lightEmphasis">visualist</span> camp) will realize more of the many differences between games and narratives, and even contribute valuable analyses using (and not abusing) narratology, but until then the narrativist paradigm will but slowly melt.</p>
<p>The weak and repetitive tradition of adventure story-games such as <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> and <span class="booktitle">Half-Life</span> should not be given our privileged, undivided attention, just because they remind us more of the movies and novels we used to study. Compared to replayable games such as <span class="booktitle">Warcraft</span> and <span class="booktitle">Counter-Strike</span>, the story-games do not pose a very interesting theoretical challenge for game studies, once we have identified their dual heritage. There are so many more important aesthetic questions to ask of better and more successful games, in particular multiplayer games. What kind of socioaesthetic exchange goes on in the South Korean multiplayer game <span class="booktitle">Lineage</span>, with two million active players? These games are not only the future of gaming, they are huge social experiments that will affect and shape the future of human communication. They will probably use stories, too; not as the overarching design principle, but as rhetorical, interplayer communication strategies, like we all do in our ordinary lives. Ever more advanced online, multiplayer games, with real instead of artificial intelligences, and ever more sophisticated simulation-worlds, will set the agenda for game studies in the coming years. But they probably won’t be called online, multiplayer games for much longer. Or “interactive narratives.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Just games, once again.</p>
<h2>Sidebar</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/vigilant" class="internal">Sidebar images</a></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/insurgent" class="internal">Stuart Moulthrop responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/lawful" class="internal">Chris Crawford responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/algorithmic" class="internal">Espen Aarseth responds</a></p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>Bringsjord, Selmer (2001). “Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment?” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/bringsjord/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/bringsjord/</a>.</p>
<p>Cawelti, John (1976). <span class="booktitle">Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p>
<p>Cayley, John (1995). <span class="booktitle">Speaking Clock</span>. <a href="http://www.shadoof.net/in/incat.html#CLOCK" class="outbound">http://www.shadoof.net/in/incat.html#CLOCK</a>.</p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (July 2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/</a>.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine (2001). “Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide.” <span class="journaltitle">Electronic Book Review</span> 11 (2001). <a href="/electropoetics/interspecial" class="internal">http://altx.com/ebr/riposte/rip11/rip11hay.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Joyce, Michael (1991). <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span>. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems.</p>
<p>Juul, Jesper (2001a). “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2001b). “Game Time, Event Time, Themability.” Presented at the CGDT Conference, Copenhagen, March 1, 2001.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (1986). “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System.” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.</p>
<p>—. (1991). <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.</p>
<p>Memmott, Talan (2000). Lexia to Perplexia. <span class="journaltitle">Electronic Book Review</span> 11. <a href="/imagenarrative/perplex" class="internal">http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr11/</a>.</p>
<p>Murray, Janet (1997). <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace</span>. New York: The Free Press.</p>
<p>King, Stephen (2000). <span class="booktitle">Riding the Bullet</span>. New York: Scribner eBook.</p>
<p>Newman, James (2001). “Reconfiguring the Videogame Player.” Games Cultures Conference, Bristol, June 30, 2001.</p>
<p>Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001). “Beyond Myth and Metaphor - The Case of Narrative in Digital Media.” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/</a>.</p>
<p>Sutton-Smith, Brian (1997). <span class="booktitle">The Ambiguity of Play</span>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/game">game</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/gameplay">gameplay</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/blade-runner">blade runner</a>, <a href="/tags/tetris">tetris</a>, <a href="/tags/super-mario">super mario</a>, <a href="/tags/everquest">everquest</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/lara-croft">lara croft</a>, <a href="/tags/tomb-raider">tomb raider</a>, <a href="/tags/jesper-juul">jesper juul</a>, <a href="/tags/poker">poker</a>, <a href="/tags/ludo">ludo</a>, <a href="/tags/chess">chess</a>, <a href="/tags/roulette">roulette</a>, <a href="/tags/star-wars">star wars</a>, <a href="/tags/doom">doom</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet">hamlet</a>, <a href="/tags/shakespeare">shakespeare</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet-holodeck">hamlet on the holodeck</a>, <a href="/tags/br">br</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator949 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigilant#commentsFrom Mystorian to Curmudgeon: Skulking Toward Finitudehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/nostalgic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Marcel O\&#039;Gorman</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-05-09</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation">You will feel, if you transcribe the passage in this orderly fashion, that the rugged impetuosity of passion, once you make it smooth and equable by adding the copulatives, falls pointless and immediately loses all its fire. Just as the binding of the limbs of runners deprives them of their power of rapid motion, so also passion, when shackled by connecting links and other appendages, chafes at the restriction, for it loses the freedom of its advance and its rapid emission as though from an engine of war. (Longinus, “On The Sublime”, Chapter 21)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">HAMLET: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?</p>
<p class="longQuotation">HORATIO: ‘Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. (William Shakespeare, <span class="booktitle">Hamlet</span>, Act V, Scene 1)</p>
<h2>Curmudgeonly Self-Indulgence</h2>
<p>CURMUDGEON: [n] An avaricious, grasping fellow; a miser; a niggard; a churl. [OE. cornmudgin, where -mudgin is prob. from OF.; cf. OE. muchares skulking thieves.]</p>
<p>How did I get here? Only five years ago I was mystoricizing with Greg Ulmer in sunny Gainesville. Today, in gray, sludgy Detroit, I am asking students to write academic essays that explain away their experimental work in HTML and Flash. What’s worse, the course topic I have chosen this term is <span class="lightEmphasis">finitude</span>, human mortality. I am on the cusp of becoming radically un-hip, a curmudgeon. The curmudgeon side makes me say things like: ‘mystories are for navel-gazers.’ Indeed, that is the problem with assigning mystories to students during the winter months in Detroit. They use the genre - a discursive network (<span class="lightEmphasis">popcycle</span>) of pop culture, critical theory, history, and autobiography - to engage in auto-psychoanalysis. They get mired in their own subjectivity, and produce work that is no more innovative than the nostalgic, self-exploratory essays encouraged in freshman composition classes. The curmudgeon also says things like: ‘hypertext is dead.’ There’s that finitude again. Where does this comment come from? Maybe, in part, from the boredom I sense when clicking through the directionless infinity of hypertext fiction. And, in part, from the way writers use digital nonlinearity as a way of masking poor writing skills. And, in part, from being overwhelmed by too much information, most of it worthless. Whatever the case may be, I am nauseated by the sense of nostalgia I feel when I look at the cover of George P. Landow’s <span class="booktitle">Hypertext Theory</span>. Hypertext theory, too, is dead. Even critical theory itself has been liquidated into a series of menu items in Photoshop and Dreamweaver. What comes next?</p>
<p>In an attempt to exorcise the curmudgeon - or at least examine him - I’m going to take this opportunity to engage in a little self-indulgent navel-gazing myself. Maybe I can rescue or at least revisit the sense of pleasure that I felt while composing the various Ulmer-inspired mystories and other heuretic exercises that I completed over the past decade. Perhaps, as well, I might be able to discover how I went from mystorian to curmudgeon in such a short time. My goal, then, is admittedly hermeneutic, which, I’ll admit, is heresy for a heuretician. Recalling a passage in Ulmer’s <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> (1989) (I will only recall Ulmer here, not quote him) I will begin by appropriating the mood of Hamlet as he pondered forensics at Yorrick’s grave. In sooth, I suppose there really is no appropriation here; as a scholar, I am always-already melancholic, always-already staring into the skull.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/marcel/skulmer/skulmer.zip%20(DOS%20batch%20file)">A Skull Session with Gregory “Golgotha” Skulmer</a></h2>
<p>SKULLFISH: [n] a whaler’s name for a whale more than two years old.</p>
<p>The very first mystory I completed was an assignment in a critical theory class at Ottawa University, my first real course in theory, and the most difficult I have ever taken. The course was taught by a stern German, a specialist in Melville and Heidegger, who once told me that ‘no great philosophy ever came out of the south.’ And yet, he deigned to include <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> (written by a Floridian) on the syllabus. Each student was required to select a text from the syllabus and give a seminar-style presentation. Admittedly, I was somewhat intimidated by older PhD students in the class, and reluctant to make a selection at all. I was the last to choose, and the only text remaining was Ulmer’s. All that I can recall of this class is a series of befuddling seminars, which I felt were more akin to mathematics than literature. I can also recall the cigarette breaks, for which I stupidly braved the bone-chilling pain of a Canadian winter.</p>
<p>SKULDUGGERY: [n] verbal misrepresentation intended to take advantage of you in some way.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that I completely grasped what Ulmer was up to in <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>, but I knew one thing for certain: I wanted to make a mystory. What’s more, I wanted to make a mystory on my computer, which at the time was a 640K portable unit with no hard drive. While this proved impossible, I did manage to gain access to a 386 in the office of a friend who worked for Corel. He not only loaned me the machine, but, after listening to my design goals, he also introduced me to Freelance Graphics, a presentation software package whose market value was destroyed by PowerPoint. Using Freelance, I created a mystory with a specific timeline that scrolled across the screen in about three minutes. I learned simultaneously how to “do theory” and how to work in Freelance Graphics, both of which I approached as an amateur.</p>
<p>SKULKING: [adj] marked by quiet and caution and secrecy; taking pains to avoid being observed. See also: dodging, escape, evasion.</p>
<p>By the time it came for my seminar on <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span>, the snow was melting. I remember the Proustian flash of smelling spring as I walked to class, which I had arranged to hold in a computer lab. I loaded my Freelance “slide show” into a 486 equipped with an LCD projector panel, and sat nervously as text blocks and images scrolled by, leaving my classmates as befuddled as they had left me during their own presentations. After the last words scrolled by, the professor asked me to explain what I had created, but I couldn’t. I suggested that my mystory, which integrated <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> itself into the popcycle, was intended to be a stand-alone, a performance piece designed to create ‘an effect’, provoke discussion. ‘An effect?’ asked the professor. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Neither was I. I didn’t really understand what I had created, and I had no particular goal in mind when creating it. I was working blindly, gluing together various snippets of discourse without any particular direction except that offered by the film-like sequencing effects in Freelance. During the summer term, I was often berated for this performance, and labeled mockingly as ‘a mystorian.’</p>
<p>SKOL: [n] Fortran pre-processor for COS (Cray Operating System).</p>
<p>Just recently, I discovered a fragmented copy of this mystory on a diskette and loaded it into my abandoned Pentium II. The “show” flew by so quickly that it was nearly impossible to read the text. Advances in processing speed have rendered the mystory unreadable, even on a Pentium II.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/marcel/gibb/gibcover.html">Gibberish: A Digital Hiding Place for Pomo Sapiens</a></h2>
<p>SCULLER: [n] someone who skulls (moves a long oar pivoted on the back of the boat to propel the boat forward). See also: oarsman, rower.</p>
<p>I abandoned Freelance Graphics when I enrolled for a second M.A., this time in Creative Writing, at the University of Windsor. A computer scientist, with whom I was discussing Eastgate’s first beta version of StorySpace, introduced me to HTML and the World Wide Web. What he showed me seemed much more flexible and robust than StorySpace, which at the time could only embed images as black and white bitmap files. I spent my year as a Creative Writing student assembling infinite hypertext networks of critical theory quotes in which nearly every word was “hotlinked,” as we said back then.</p>
<p>SCULD: [n] Goddess of fate: Future. See also: Norn.</p>
<p>My education in theory, then, was classical, acquired by a word-for-word transcribing of “the masters” from print to screen. Longinus himself would have approved of this method, which also describes how I learned HTML, “stealing” code from the web pages of others.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">This writer shows us, if only we were willing to pay him heed, that another way (beyond anything we have mentioned) leads to the sublime. And what, and what manner of way, may that be? It is the imitation and emulation of previous great poets and writers. And let this, my dear friend, be an aim to which we steadfastly apply ourselves. For many men are carried away by the spirit of others as if inspired, just as it is related of the Pythian priestess when she approaches the tripod, where there is a rift in the ground which (they say) exhales divine vapour. By heavenly power thus communicated she is impregnated and straightway delivers oracles in virtue of the afflatus. Similarly from the great natures of the men of old there are borne in upon the souls of those who emulate them (as from sacred caves) what we may describe as <span class="lightEmphasis">effluences</span>, so that even those who seem little likely to be possessed are thereby inspired and succumb to the spell of the others’ greatness. (Longinus, “On The Sublime”, Chapter XIII)</p>
<p>In the end, I learned more about writing - primarily, how to maintain a complex sequential argument - by transcribing Barthes and assembling HTML code than I did in all the workshops I attended in grad school. While I did write my share of short stories - all conventional fiction - my M.A. project was a hypertext entitled “Gibberish,” in which I ironically applied postmodern theory to a number of paintings by the Windsor artist Stephen Gibb. I sent a link to an early version of the project to Greg Ulmer, along with a diskette containing the mystory I had created in Ottawa. Ulmer suggested that I apply to the University of Florida’s PhD program.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/marcel/blake/10/">1/0</a></h2>
<p>SKULL AND CROSSBONES: [n] emblem warning of danger or death. See also: black flag, emblem, Jolly Roger, pirate flag.</p>
<p>What frustrated me about Ulmer’s seminars was not the lack of direction, a lack of those predictable assignments that are the whipping boys of heuretics, but the fact that, in Ulmer’s terms, we were in class ‘to do theory, not art.’ In other words, our goal was not to make things that look pretty, but to work with ideas, to invent methods, even if our goal was to invent a ‘picture theory.’ Isn’t it possible, I thought, to achieve a more holistic combination of theory and aesthetics? William Blake, for example, invented relief-etch printing, a method - inspired by his own distaste for mechanical engraving techniques - which he outlines in visionary detail in <span class="booktitle">The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</span>. The problem was that not one of us in the seminars was trained as an artist. We were all English majors working with the tools at our disposal. We couldn’t draw or paint, but we could certainly steal images off the Web and manipulate them.</p>
<p>SCULLION: [n] a kitchen servant employed to do menial tasks.</p>
<p>My opus mystorius as a student of Ulmer’s was a hypertext I ended up calling <span class="booktitle">1/0</span> based on the recurrent pattern of 1 and 0 or I and O shapes that serendipitously appeared in the images I had chosen for the project. <span class="booktitle">1/0</span> uses a popcycle to explore/explode the issue of racism that I encountered as a Canadian living in the Southern United States. Included in the popcycle is the work of William Blake, particularly the “Little Black Boy” engraving from the <span class="booktitle">Songs of Innocence</span>.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">My mother bore me in the southern wild,<br />
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;<br />
White as an angel is the English child,<br />
But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">1/0</span> played a central role in my dissertation, which amounts to a lengthy explanation that I wish I could have offered four years earlier to my theory professor at the University of Ottawa.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://libarts.udmercy.edu/e-crit/enl491/blake/4fold.html">The 4fold Vision</a></h2>
<p>SCULP: [v.t.] to sculpture; to carve; to engrave [Obs. or Humorous].</p>
<p>Something about the materiality of Blake’s work, his holistic interweaving of philosophy, art, and technics, suggests a fruitful model for thinking about discourse in the electronic apparatus. After graduating from the University of Florida, my primary obsession was to invent a new mode of academic discourse by drawing on William Blake as a “media exemplar.” I devised an assignment for my students entitled <span class="booktitle">The 4Fold Vision</span>, which is an image-rich modification of the mystory form. Rather than drawing on verbal puncepts as a method of interlinking modes of discourse, The 4Fold is glued together with visual puns motivated by the schematic shapes in Blake’s art: the arch, the inverted U, the circle, and the spiral.</p>
<p>SKULLCAP: [n] rounded brimless cap fitting the crown of the head. See also: beanie.</p>
<p>When I introduced the assignment to my E-Crit students, the response was one of befuddlement, and the results were varied. Among graduating seniors this term, this assignment stands out as the one that had the greatest impact on their formation as media critics and designers. A 4Fold Vision completed by <a class="outbound" href="http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/~ruudar/portfolio/electronica/ani_gif.htm">Amy Ruud</a>, one of the first E-Crit graduates, traces the ‘O’ shape through the film <span class="filmtitle">Dogma</span>, the Berlin Wall, Baudrillard, Blake and her friend’s brain tumor. Her animated gif captures the schematic essence of her 4Fold, but what impressed me most was the “justification” that she wrote to accompany her project. I had never before required students to write a justification of their work in experimental critical theory. At this point, I realized that <span class="foreignWord">écriture</span> had to remain central to E-Crit. I began assigning lengthy essays in my classes.</p>
<h2>Necromedia</h2>
<p>SKULL, THE PLACE OF A: See GOLGOTHA: [n] a hill near Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.</p>
<p>In the winter of 2001, I began investigating a pattern of coincidental relationships that I had noticed between death and media technology. These included Watson’s gallows telephone, Marey’s chronophotographic rifle, and the first human ultrasound, which took place in the disused turret of a B-29 bomber. Technology’s greatest end is for military uses, for the destruction of human beings. Technology renders bodies immobile and redundant. Technology promotes ghost industries and fantasies of immortality. I invented the term “necromedia” to describe this seeming collusion between death and media technologies. Soon, necromedia scenes appeared everywhere: in <span class="filmtitle">American Beauty</span>’s elision of gun and video camera; in <span class="filmtitle">Vanilla Sky</span>’s Coltrane hologram and cryogenic dreaming; in <span class="filmtitle">Ringu</span>’s lethal and ghostly VHS tape.</p>
<p>SKULL: [n] the bony skeleton of the head of vertebrates. See also: axial skeleton, bone, braincase, head, jaw, jugal bone, mala, malar bone, orbit, orbital cavity, os, os sphenoidale, os zygomaticum, sphenoid bone, zygomatic bone.</p>
<p>I began taking very seriously Katherine Hayles’ suggestion that we learn to accept and celebrate our finitude. She was echoing Heidegger’s concerns about technology and being, but without the luddite and fascist associations that have made Heidegger inconvenient for media critics.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: “ge-stell” (enframing). We dare to use this word in a sense that has been thoroughly unfamiliar up to now. According to ordinary usage, the word Gestell (frame) means some kind of apparatus, e.g., a bookrack. Gestell is also the name for a <span class="emphasis">skeleton</span>. And the employment of the word Gestell (enframing) that is now required of us seems equally eerie, not to speak of the arbitrariness with which words of a mature language are so misused. (Heidegger, 1977: npn)</p>
<p>How do we celebrate our finitude when, all around us, others are celebrating their capacity to be placed on call as cybernetic standing reserve? After teaching a few courses on necromedia, it occurred to me that the sprawling hypertext projects I was assigning encouraged only a drive toward infinity, a resistance to finitude. I was hoping to provoke the opposite of that resistance, an acceptance and celebration of finitude.</p>
<h2><a class="outbound" href="http://www.e-crit.com/running/">Running (Posthu)Man</a></h2>
<p>SKULL SESSION: [n] a practice match; teaching strategy to an athletic team. See also: grooming, preparation, training.</p>
<p>A few years ago I ran my first marathon. I took up running to relieve work-related stress, provoke creative thought, and to alleviate the chronic back pain that resulted from sitting for several hours a day in front of a screen. Since then I have been running trail races only, primarily 50K ultra marathons. Over time, my necromedia course morphed into a design studio on running, based, of course, on a concept I developed while running. The studio is not only about running in the strictly biomechanical sense, but also in the various metaphorical outcroppings of the word, which provide a vehicle for discussing the impact of media technologies on time, space, and the body. I have asked students in the class to develop Flash movies that will play on a laptop cable-hacked into a treadmill. The heartbeat and speed of a runner or walker will power these movies. My own movie, entitled <span class="filmtitle">DREADMILL</span>, revolves around the increasing immobility of our culture (Detroit was named “America’s fattest city” this year). It draws heavily on the necromedia concept, and combines graphics, text, clips from Hollywood film, and talking heads. I now realize that I have moved away from the infinitude of hypertext, and am turning back toward the genre of my first mystory.</p>
<p>SKULL: [n] [see {school} a multitude.] a school, company, or shoal. [Obs.]</p>
<p>Jeff Rice, a colleague of mine (also a former student of Ulmer’s and “cool” theorist), noted that the <span class="filmtitle">DREADMILL</span> project is very Ulmerian in nature because it draws on an outrageous, perhaps surrealist premise: ‘you need a treadmill to teach a media studies class.’ I hadn’t considered this perspective, which Jeff was quick to offer in rebuttal to my recent threats about abandoning the Florida School and hypertext for Blake and artists’ books. What I do know is that the concept of putting a treadmill in an English Department classroom and wiring it to a laptop is emblematic of what I see as the future of Humanities research in a culture driven by technological efficiency. This interdisciplinary project, which involves the cooperation of faculty and students in E-Crit, Engineering, Architecture, and English, places the Humanities back at the core of higher education. In opposition to the techno-scientific focus of the contemporary university, I would propose a program not in humanities computing, or even in human/computer interaction, but in <span class="lightEmphasis">humane computing</span>, a program that puts both the body and mind, with all their finite limitations, in a holistic relationship with the development of new technologies.</p>
<h2>Post-Run Cooldown</h2>
<p>Just recently I discovered that I suffered a stress fracture in my left hip, a result of obsessive training, combined with long races that are beyond the limitations of my biomechanical abilities. I will require a hip replacement in the near future, which will qualify me as a literal cyborg. I wonder if, at that point, I will begin to reconsider the emancipatory potential of cyberspace. In any case, it will make for a great mystory on becoming un-hip.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Blake, William.”Little Black Boy” <span class="booktitle">Songs of Innocence</span> (1789) in <span class="booktitle">The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</span>. Edited by David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).</p>
<p><span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.blakearchive.org">The William Blake Archive</a></span> (March 22, 2004).</p>
<p>Hayles, Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).</p>
<p>Heidegger, Martin. <span class="booktitle">The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays</span> Translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977).</p>
<p><span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.hyperdictionary.com">Hyperdictionary</a></span> (March 22, 2004).</p>
<p>Landow, George. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span> (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).</p>
<p>Longinus, <span class="booktitle">On the Sublime</span> Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. (Cambridge, 1899), <a class="outbound" href="http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/longinus/index.htm">Peitho’s web</a> (March 22, 2004).</p>
<p>Shakespeare, William. <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/hamlet/">Hamlet</a></span> (1600).</p>
<p>Ulmer, Gregory L. <span class="booktitle">Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video</span> (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ulmer">ulmer</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet">hamlet</a>, <a href="/tags/longinus">Longinus</a>, <a href="/tags/running">running</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/teletheory">teletheory</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1200 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comNick Montfort responds in turnhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/as-is
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Nick Montfort</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/fictive">Interactive Fiction</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I’m very pleased to read replies from two theorists whose earlier writing and guidance has been so helpful in my work, theorists who both also create new media. I’ll start by addressing some important but more specific points.</p>
<p>Regarding Brenda Laurel’s reply:</p>
<p>· I mean to call IF (not all computer games) “a potential narrative” in a formalist sense, without appealing to theories of reader response. Thus, my reference to Gerald Prince rather than Wolfgang Iser.</p>
<p>· Some games contain good material for storytelling; providing such can be important. As Henry Jenkins distinguished, though, this isn’t exactly the same as a game actually generating a story.</p>
<p>· My definition of “game” may indeed be lacking. “Structured play” has appeal. Are catch, Hackey Sack, and tea parties all best understood as games? I’m unsure. Whatever the case, Laurel’s comments alert me that looking at IF as “play” - not just “game” - is clearly important, also.</p>
<p>· Fortunately, Murray has added to my few sentences on the riddle; my discussion was indeed incomplete, without even a definition. Chapter 2 of my <span class="booktitle">Twisty Little Passages</span> deals with the riddle vis-a-vis IF much more thoroughly. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark” is not a riddle, though; no one is supposed to answer it. Murray points to the riddle in <span class="booktitle">Hamlet</span>: “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?”</p>
<p>Regarding Janet Murray’s reply:</p>
<p>· MOO interfaces join hypertext and IF navigation; they certainly hold lessons for both forms. Since a MOO is a different sort of social and creative space, its interface, convenient for bringing you to chat with your friends, may not be best for reading and replying in IF.</p>
<p>· Natural language (only a small subset of which is “supported” in IF) can raise interactors’ hopes. My insistence on it as part of my definition belies my interests and my ideals for IF. I’ve been trying to improve this symmetrical interface, since I think the result will be rewarding. Also, I do, as Laurel suggests, think that graphical adventures should be considered alongside text adventures in some discussions, even though my literary bent leads me to prefer the narrower definition of “language” in talking about IF interfaces.</p>
<p>· Riddling can indeed be a “contest” (within that Venn diagram circle) but the wit and mastery of the riddler is not always the main point. May Swenson’s delightful <span class="booktitle">Poems to Solve</span> holds easy but excellent riddles; Emily Dickinson’s riddles are other fairly recent American examples that are not mostly about mastery but rather a new perspective.</p>
<p>To speak more broadly, Laurel’s equating the “world” of IF to the material of a play is tremendously enlightening. The equation isn’t a new one; its implications are described in Laurel’s thesis and <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. One important poetic question it prompts is whether the material causes of the action (the objects and locations in the simulated world) are exactly those required for the formal causes of the action (the overarching purpose of the IF). What’s wonderful is how this “world” and “material” equation shows the usefulness of multiple perspectives. Design of IF is informed by the dramatic perspective; since the IF world is also <span class="lightEmphasis">spatial</span> in Murray’s sense, other approaches to space can be of direct help. If our space is difficult to navigate when it should be easy, or vice versa, the problem is one that - although it can be seen and addressed from the dramatic perspective - may best be remedied by consideration from another standpoint, perhaps that of architecture. Murray has pointed out several shared features of new media that can be understood better by being scrutinized in terms of existing forms. Laurel’s application of Aristotelian drama is not only useful by itself; it is also a model for how to see and better understand new media in relation to an older form.</p>
<p>Murray is right to point out that different new media artifacts share qualities, and that there are general insights (such as the many in <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span> that are applicable to IF) to be had about new media. I do find that overgeneralization can be a problem in characterizing new media forms, but I do not mean to rule out “new media” as a concept. Direct manipulation is one paradigm that has some general applicability, as noted. Still, an interface in which both user and system employ the same mode, such as natural language - one that is “symmetric,” as Laurel calls it - has its advantages, too. IF can, as Murray suggests, be profitably seen as “conversation” - another figure for IF, like “play,” that I sadly omitted in my original tour, but which highlights the value of this symmetry. Discussion of IF is also informed by principles of new media design, but it’s important in applying these principles to consider specific older forms that are related particularly to IF - as Murray does in taking up the matter of the riddle in more detail. Of course, IF is an invention of the twentieth century with its own essential nature. A theory truly native to the computer game (once “game” is defined) will provide insights, and perhaps even a framework for integrating what we know about IF - assuming such a game studies theory does not react against “story” so strongly as to not admit something like IF, which generates narratives in response to typed text.</p>
<p>To see IF as “new media,” and to add “play” and “conversation” to the ten perspectives I originally mentioned, offers thirteen ways of looking at interactive fiction, perhaps enough for a clear vision of sorts. The thirteen ways Wallace Stevens offered are, after all, also one way; they build on and speak to each other. Seeing IF as riddle reveals new things about IF’s nature. The word “as” is important - it’s not <span class="booktitle">Computers Are Theatre</span>, after all, and <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> ‘s subtitle isn’t <span class="booktitle">New Media is Story, Performance, and Game</span>. To reduce any new media form to something that it literally is not can’t be helpful. There are some things IF “is” and can be reduced to, such as a computer program or a potential narrative, but these too are each only one way of seeing. IF is not <span class="lightEmphasis">only</span> a computer program; “potential narrative” is one of many circles.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/x=reader">back to New Readings introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/henry-jenkins">henry jenkins</a>, <a href="/tags/twisty-little-passages">twisty little passages</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet">hamlet</a>, <a href="/tags/moo">MOO</a>, <a href="/tags/may-swenson">may swenson</a>, <a href="/tags/poems-solve">poems to solve</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1058 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comMark Bernstein and Diane Greco respond in turnhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/princely
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Mark Bernstein</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-07</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/hyperbaton">Card Shark and Thespis</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The difference between our <span class="booktitle">Thespis</span> and Stern’s <span class="booktitle">Façade</span> lies, in the end, in two questions: whether computational representation of the internal psychic life of characters is feasible, and whether it is useful.</p>
<p>Stern may perhaps be correct in thinking the <span class="booktitle">Façade</span> project feasible, and we wish him well. It is clearly a difficult challenge, but it is not one that <span class="booktitle">Thespis</span> needs to tackle, since we believe dramatists are already rather good at writing plays, and they do not need sophisticated computational systems to do it. Whether <span class="booktitle">Thespis</span> will necessarily produce rich dramatic experiences remains, as Perlin points out, an empirical question. <span class="booktitle">Thespis</span> requires writing, not computational psychology. Moreover, the system does not require extravagant programming. Sculptural hypertext systems like <span class="booktitle">Card Shark</span> and <span class="booktitle">Thespis</span> can be written by a competent undergraduate, while <span class="booktitle">Façade</span> has taken years of Stern and Mateas’s considerable talents.</p>
<p>The utility question, interestingly, may boil down to the efficacy of method acting. Many, following Stanislavski, believe it useful for an actor to learn to experience the drama as if he or she were actually participating - that performance benefits from the ability to experience the emotions that the character would experience in the dramatic situation. This is not necessarily true: the gentleman in black is not the Prince of Denmark. In the end, he’s paid to play the play; what he feels in the process is his business (and in any case, we cannot know what he’s feeling).</p>
<p>The actor does not need to “become” the character. The phrase, in fact, has no meaning. There <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> no character. There are only lines on a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor. When he or she says them simply, in an attempt to achieve an object more or less like that suggested by the author, the audience sees an <span class="lightEmphasis">illusion</span> of a character on the stage [Mamet 1999].</p>
<p>In “My Friend Hamlet,” we argue that letting a sane, sensible character like you or me into the scene collapses the drama’s sustaining illusion. It is generous of Stern to call our argument “definitive and devastating.” Yes, it has been a dream for some players to be permitted to do anything within the fictive universe. People often dream of things they can’t have, and wouldn’t want to have if they could [Tolkein, 240]. If the player is a hero, she must <span class="lightEmphasis">by definition</span> struggle against the world model. The boundaries and limitations of the world model become <span class="lightEmphasis">by definition</span> the hero-player’s chief concern.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/outgrowth">back to Hypertexts and Interactives introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ken-perlin">ken perlin</a>, <a href="/tags/andrew-stern">andrew stern</a>, <a href="/tags/card-shark">card shark</a>, <a href="/tags/thespis">thespis</a>, <a href="/tags/stanislavski">stanislavski</a>, <a href="/tags/method-acting">method acting</a>, <a href="/tags/david-mamet">david mamet</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet">hamlet</a>, <a href="/tags/jrr-tolkein">j.r.r. tolkein</a>, <a href="/tags/drama">drama</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1011 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com